Neil Midgley reviews the second episode of Peaky Blinders, the BBC drama set
in Twenties Birmingham and starring Cillian Murphy.

Two trends in TV drama are colliding in BBC Two’s Peaky Blinders. It fits with all the period pieces that nestle in and around the First World War – including Titanic, Parade’s End, The Wipers Times and, of course, Downton Abbey. But it’s joyless enough to join the current crop of misery dramas, including The Village on BBC One and anything (but particularly Southcliffe) on Channel 4.

Peaky Blinders – a serial about a criminal gang in Birmingham in 1919 – has much going for it, in both categories. Like the best period dramas, it has obviously had an awful lot of money spent on it – the on-screen look is so glossy, it could have been hand-polished with 10-pound notes. But unlike Parade’s End, in which the suffragettes literally walked past carrying signs, Peaky Blinders also manages to weave in most of its period context (communists, the Irish question) rather deftly.

Some of the misery dramas get so depressed that they can barely sit up long enough to have a plot – to wit, Rory Kinnear’s largely aimless meandering through Southcliffe. Peaky Blinders, to its credit, doesn’t half clip along – indeed, the pace of the first episode became rather indigestible. Last night’s second episode, happily, took more time over things. The romantic shadowboxing between Tommy Shelby (the gangster antihero, played by Cillian Murphy) and Grace Burgess (the honey trap, played by Annabelle Wallis) was particularly well-realised.

But Peaky Blinders does fall headlong into a trap that none of the misery dramas has yet solved. In its unrelenting gloom, it fails to offer viewers a reason why they should give a monkey’s about its central character. The best TV anti-heroes have endearing foibles that draw us in: Walt’s cancer in Breaking Bad, and Frank’s sheer Machiavellian joy in House of Cards.

Tommy Shelby’s bad experiences in the Great War, by contrast, simply don’t make him an appealing soul. As a result, the conflicts that he faces – with other criminal gangs, with the police, with his own family – are interesting enough, but not irresistibly intriguing. And that’s where the rogues of Birmingham really could take a lesson from the aristocrats of Downton.